Five Real Scandals Republicans Might Want To Address

May 16, 2013

Bill Scher

Over at The Week, I make the argument that presidential scandal politics usually fail to lift the political prospects of the party outside the White House. No party has reaped a political reward from pushing scandal since Nixon, yet both parties have repeatedly tried.

However, short of impeachment or electoral gains, opposition parties may be sated by simply using scandal to distract the President from advancing his agenda. But today, that doesn’t make sense. Republicans already have the numbers in Congress to block what they want. And the main item on Obama’s legislative agenda for the year is one that leading Republicans now support: immigration reform.

Republican might also want to ask themselves: do we really believe there’s any there there?

Does it even make sense that Obama would have lost re-election if he quickly blamed Al Qaeda for Benghazi, having already proven his counterterrorism bona fides?

Does it makes sense that an IRS managed by a Bush administration holdover would allow a plot to prevent Republicans from defeating Obama by deliberately targeting county-level Tea Party groups but blessed Karl Rove’s new machine with tax-exempt status?

Is it even a scandal for the Justice Department to apply current law and subpoena phone records in a sensitive national security leak investigation? Controversial and worthy of debate, but no heads are going to roll if it’s legal.

Meanwhile, there are real scandals out there: festering crises that demand policy solutions and government action. For example:

4. More than 4 million Americans have been jobless for more than half a year. The long-term unemployment problem is not only devastating for those directly affect, it’s also a major drag on the recovery of the entire economy. Those out of the workforce for extended periods of time have a much harder time getting rehired than those briefly unemployed. We are risking the creation of a permanent underclass to care for instead of tapping our labor pool to the fullest extent possible.

These are all massive problems with no easy fixes. You might think a major political party would have something to say about them, spend some time developing ideas to solve them, and seek to build public support for those ideas.

Or Republicans can chase Benghazi down the rabbit hole.

There are plenty of scandals out there to choose from. What a party chooses to focus on speaks volumes.

A mass refusal by the public to watch Donald Trump on TV will deprive him of big ratings, which he routinely uses to create a false impression of widespread popularity.

About Bill Scher

Bill Scher is the Online Campaign Manager at Campaign for America's Future, and the executive editor of LiberalOasis.com. He is the author of Wait! Don't Move To Canada!: A Stay-and-Fight Strategy to Win Back America, a regular contributor to Bloggingheads.tv and host of the LiberalOasis Radio Show weekly podcast. He has opinion articles that have been published by the New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Omaha World-Herald, and has made appearances on CNN, MSNBC and NPR among other TV and radio outlets.